Launching Major Projects, to boost growth is a very good idea, and the
president of the Republic was quite right to propose it. But why on earth
talk about a Big Loan to finance them, while the internal and external
deficits of the country are exploding at levels never reached in history,
worsening the debt, whose service is already the largest budget item, whose
cost will become deadly when interest rates will increase?
And about what investments are we speaking? If they are already planned in
the budget, or should be, it means that the Big Loan does in fact only aims
at removing some expenses from the budget, in order to leave more room for
operating expenses. And if they are not, we still need to prove that they
are cost-effective and useful.
It is therefore better to finance major projects obviously necessary
(digital technology, nanotechnologies, biotechnologies and solar energy)
through public and private means already existing. In particular, by banks
(still too nervous), investment funds and insurance companies, by preventing
them to obey the absurd upcoming Solvency II rules, which will prohibit them
from investing in non listed companies.
If, nevertheless, political power persists and maintains the idea of an
additional public loan, this one should not increase the deficit; and for
that, it will have to finance only investments allowing the State to make
necessary savings to finance it; in other words investments supporting the
reduction of expenditure, increasing revenue and the quality of public
services.
I deduce two major projects, far from the current trends and very far from
being taken seriously:
1. A major program of e-administration aiming at ensuring each year 15
billion euros of savings for the State, by digitization of social security
contributions, recruitment in public jobs: by digital simplication of
administrative procedures and cost of the administrative procedures required
of businesses; by the creation of a virtual unique counter aggregating the
services of the various administrations; by the centralized paperless
processing of invoices, of flows among administrations, and of data
security; by the dematerialization of people services such as the
Universal Employment Service Check; by an Internet grant of social housing
and the digitization of cultural heritage.
2. Investing in training, career management and conditions of employment of
the civil servants, from schools to hospitals, to the post office, the
police or the judicial system so that each of them find a reason to be,
thereby improving the quality of the public service. So that to the modest
wages of the public service civil servants are not added the humiliation by
the unworthy leaders and the crushing by bureaucracies; and so that we
finally learn how to treat the users as customers.